


bête

by thefudge



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Adultery, F/M, Mutual Pining, Repressed Russians, Sexual Content, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27718286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefudge/pseuds/thefudge
Summary: How terrible to fall in love with someone so young.
Relationships: Vasily Borgov/Beth Harmon
Comments: 29
Kudos: 392





	bête

**Author's Note:**

> oh, what's that? it's been less than 24 hours since i posted my other beth/borgov fic? listen, i don't control the muse. she comes and goes as she pleases. anyway, these two consume me!

His son drops an ashy leaflet in his lap. The paper is faded. On the front is the massive bulk of an infernal beast, eyes glowing bright in the snowy night. Between his paws he has captured a wilting maiden with roses in her hair.

 _La Belle et La Bête_ is written in cursive underneath. There will be ballet performance at the Mariinsky. Can they go, please?

Vasily runs his hand over the boy’s soft head of hair.

He stares at the words.

 _La_ _Bête._

_Beth._

The correlation comes unbidden. Yes, she, the little monstrous thing. Calling her beauty would be superfluous.

He doesn’t want to give her that too.

“Can we go, Papa?”

He doesn’t really hear the question.

“My mother had just died, but all I could think about was how you beat me. All I could see was our game and your moves and my pathetic defeat. I was trying to – find a way to keep sane - and your face and your fingers moving the pieces kept me awake at night. I don’t know if it helped, or if it made things worse.”

She tells him the story in fragments as they walk on the banks of the Neva. He breathes more easily in Saint Petersburg, away from the reproaching eyes of his family. Yet he also breathes harder, because without the guiding shadow of his wife, he could very well sink into very deep waters.

Beth buries her nose in her coat. Her cheeks – her entire face – like a bruised strawberry, bitten into.

“Here,” he says, untying his thick scarf from his throat.

He makes Beth stop in the middle of the path as he wraps the scarf around her shoulders and mouth and nose. He is not particularly gentle.

Beth fingers the scarf and inhales briefly. Only her moth-eyes blink up at him in the cold.

He turns away abruptly. They start walking again.

“I am sorry about your mother.”

“She was a lovely pianist,” she says quietly, muffled by his scarf. “She might have become great.”

“Might have. There are too many might haves in this world,” he muses coolly, staring at the grey water, almost frozen, yet still fighting to stay alive, lurching against the canal ridges.

Beth ignores this.

“Did you think about me too? The way I did?” she demands.

 _Spoiled brat_ , he wants to say.

“No,” he says. “I don’t need to think about you.”

 _You’re always here, somehow_ , he thinks.

Beth steps closer to him, but their overcoats do not touch.

“I don’t know why I came. Kentucky is a lot warmer.” Her voice is lazy and resentful, even though she knows very well the hold she has on him.

“I should probably catch a flight back home tonight,” she adds, in full possession of her power, monstrous, selfish little thing.

His fingers reach out and grip her arm painfully.

“You’ve become rather indolent.”

Beth looks up at him. Her kittenish smile falters. Her eyes are full of yearning. “Don’t be cross. I’m only like this because I miss you.”

He is tempted to shut his eyes. How terrible to fall in love with someone so young.

“Come along,” he says quietly, not letting go of her arm.

Eyes watch them from the opposite bank. The agents often make jokes about the age difference, but they follow the damned pair with great interest.

How can two brilliant people be ever so stupid?

The window becomes white with fog. And her breath. Her breath is a different white. She is startled by the way her body always leaves her, always abandons her and carries on its own destruction. Deep down, she feels guilty, and she wants to stop. But her hand guides his hand between her legs and she can’t control it. And he is even more vulnerable to this blindness.

Sometimes, there is nothing behind his eyes except a hunting instinct, a knight looking for a pawn, a black square jumping over white. He wants to remove her from the board entirely, and he thinks he _can_ achieve this if he fucks her enough times that it empties them both. Maybe this time when he buries himself in her it will be final and they won’t come back for more.

How many games can you play before you tire of chess? 

He fucks her into the desk’s sharp edges until the bruises on her thighs turn violet. The wood rattles and the metal hinges cry out. She bites into his shoulder, into the fabric of his bleached shirt, guttural sounds traveling from her mouth down his spine as he yanks her hips angrily, whispering _that’s it, you’re almost there_ into her ear.

When she starts convulsing uncontrollably and he feels her pulsing around him, dragging him deeper inside her, he wrests her chin from his shoulder and kisses her mouth, needing to capture that release of breath, of white giving into black.

Some form of control.

She sometimes cries afterwards. He hates to see her cry.

Every time, it sinks a knife in him, because she’s such a fierce crier, like summoning tears from a cachet of endless sorrow.

She also enjoys it.

She tells him, “I guess it’s exciting to have so much to cry about.”

Her deadpan humor, that world-weary attitude of a girl twice her age: he is equally exasperated and enchanted.

“We will eventually stop,” he says one evening in Zurich, as she rests her head on his chest and measures his heartbeats. They are still fully clothed. His hand is tangled in her hair.

She keeps buttoning and unbuttoning the slit of his trousers, tracing her nail around each button.

“And then what?” she asks. “I’ll never see you again?”

“It’s probably for the best,” he says, in that factory-like voice, conveyor belt spitting her out.

She almost tears the button from the seams. “You _love_ me.”

Borgov yanks a strand of her hair, making her look up.

“I may stop loving you if you ruin my good pair of trousers.”

Beth laughs and his mouth curls up like smoke, and the intensity of this feeling chokes them both.

“But you love me, either way,” she says, feeding herself on the knowledge.

He heaves a sigh. His thumb brushes the side of her jaw. He is about to say something tremendously stupid.

“I did not know it was like this.”

Beth frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I had not felt it before.”

She opens her mouth. _But your wife?_

His eyes warn her not to ask.

Beth sinks back against him, head on his chest. She is his first. She has always wanted to be the first in everything. But this – she will treasure this.

Sometimes, they’ll play a few rounds when they come down from their high. Leisurely. No audience or scores in sight.

Just them in bed and a small board between them.

They both seem to lose, somehow, at the same time. He gets distracted by her flushed skin. She can still taste herself on his lips. They are both coated in each other. 

“Draw,” she mumbles wearily, sinking back into the sheets.

“Draw,” he admits cowardly, pulling her against him.

It’s not that they can’t give each other anything new. It’s just that their affair of the mind can only happen in public, where everyone can see, while this fluid thing between bodies must remain indoors. 

Strange that no one can tell from their games.

Strange that they can’t see the intimate exchange of power, more lurid than sex.

The honey trap was laid in that one foolish moment when he got up during a game in Moscow to go look at her recently vacated table.

She watched him, heart in her throat, and felt she had already won. This was what she had always wanted.

He caught her looking, caught himself looking too. He rubbed the side of his jaw.

The space between them was no longer empty.

And no one else noticed.

Strange, that.

She doesn’t sign up for the London tournament, even though they arranged to meet there. She sends him no letter, no note. He walks around Westminster, feeling like a fool.

Weeks pass and he seethes, but also worries. Has the beast taken over? Has she fallen into a destructive rabbit hole?

He finally calls her house in the dead of the night.

It’s early noon in Kentucky.

She picks up.

“Beth.”

“Oh. Hi. I can’t believe you actually called.”

“London. You were not there.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I couldn’t make it.”

“Why not?”

“Personal matter.”

He grips the receiver. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I – well, I’ll be fine.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m just putting my life in order. You – you probably shouldn’t call here again.”

The pit in his stomach is vertiginous. So, this is it. This is what it feels like.

Not heartbreak. Rather, a collapse that no organ can survive.

“You said we'd stop eventually,” she reminds him, mouth full of tears.

 _God_ , why had he said that? 

“Will I –”

He stops. He will see her at tournaments, but she will not really be there, will she?

“Beth,” he says her name again, as if to make sure she is still, in this fleeting moment, his.

“I have to go.”

She hangs up first. And he repeats her parting words, _I have to go, I have to go, I have to go,_ as if trying to bottle the sound of her voice.

He plays mechanically, sharpening his cruelty, but without offering any technical dexterity. He is dead at the board, shuffling the pieces to get rid of them. He still wins, but they say Borgov is settling into middle-age. He is slowly fading out.

The government is concerned with his performance.

One of the agents visits him at home when his wife is out shopping.

He places an envelope of photos before him.

“Look inside, Tovarishch.”

Borgov’s fingers slip. He drops them. He bends down to pick up the photos of her strewn over his carpet. He drops them again. He kneels there and stares.

Beth, crossing the street. Beth in front of her quaint little house in the suburbs.

“We estimate she’s in her second trimester. Six months. Pretty visible at this point.”

Borgov hates that this odious man looked at photos of her in this state.

“That is why she ceased contact,” the pig continues in oblivious fashion. “She’s planning on being a single mother.”

His mouth dries, thinking of her on the phone, holding in her tears, pregnant and alone. His child.

“I imagine the kid will be a real chess prodigy with genes like that,” the agent jokes, unaware of the fury that Borgov is keeping under a tight lid. How he’d like to choke the man.

“Why have you shown me this?” he asks, lowering his head.

The agent chews on his own saliva. “Morale boost. You looked like you needed it. And well – if we play our cards right, Harmon could be ours.”

“What?”

“We arrange for you to divorce your wife. Get shared custody of the boy. Then you ask Harmon to marry you, on condition that she moves here with her child and renounces her American citizenship. The party would be happy with a Grandmaster.”

“The Americans would never let that happen,” he argues, feeling sick to his stomach and yet – and _yet_ – deliriously, treacherously happy.

The agent yawns. “Let us worry about the Americans. What do you say, Tovarishch?”

His father used to read the story so often that the old library volume kept raining papery flakes on his head. But he never got tired of _Father Sergius._ It is not Tolstoy’s best perhaps, but the scene where the prince-turned-hermit cuts off his own finger to resist the temptations of a woman who shows up unannounced at his door always moves and thrills Borgov. He has always liked to think he’d do the same.

But his fingers are completely intact as he opens his palm and takes Beth’s hand in his.

She lifts her sunglasses, offering him those terrifying eyes.

He pulls her into an embrace, only not to look at them.

Beth curls her fingers on the back of his neck affectionately.

“You’ve been waiting long? There was a delay.”

Her voice is unsure. She is trying to be her usual, unflappable self, but she must be more scared than he can imagine.

“The wait doesn’t matter,” he says, poring over her features.

They stand in the middle of the airport like two wandering birds who came in from the dark. 

Beth smiles a tremulous smile. It’s true what they say about pregnant women. There is a glow. But there is always a glow with her.

He places his arm around her waist and guides her towards the exit, and in this way, he has a chance to hold his hand close to her belly. Beth leans into him, almost purring. He feels like a fool. But she is home and she is his.

A cage does not have to be a prison.

In the car, he tells her quietly, shoulders drawn, “I am sorry, darling.”

_I have done this to you._

Beth smiles a faint smile.

“I’d rather you weren’t,” she replies. “I don’t want you feeling sorry for yourself or me. If we are going to do this, I want you to be remorseless.”

She is already more Russian than him, already a wife-to-be.

Shame and pride sharpen love in equal measure.

He takes her to the ballet, a few evenings later.

It’s a different one, but it doesn’t matter.

She knows where his eyes will be, at all times.

When they get back home – _home_ – he sits her down in the armchair and he makes tea. He brings her a steaming cup. He kneels before the chair and he kisses the slope of her belly.

Beth runs a hand through his combed hair.

After a few minutes, he makes an attempt to rise.

She grazes his cheek with her finger.

“You can kneel a little longer,” Beth drawls, lazy and indolent and comfortable with him.

His lips twitch, eminently proud of where he's placed the queen, knowing the board is now hers, and he thinks, _my little beast._

**Author's Note:**

> Oh yeah, Borgov calls Saint Petersburg by its true name in his head, and not Leningrad, as it was called then. As someone whose country was part of the Soviet bloc, I am not sorry, lol. Thank you for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tumbling down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28751178) by [SpitFire97](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpitFire97/pseuds/SpitFire97)




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